Worth reading: iZettle, Infogr.am, Mendeley, Rocket, Playdemic

There are so many interesting stories out there and unfortunately we don’t have the time to cover all of them. With our section “Worth reading” we provide you (once in a while) with some links to interesting articles of other publications:

Swedish payments startup iZettle is the leading European rival to the U.S.-based Square. And now that the Scandinavian company is adding Android support to its arsenal, the potential for conflict between the two companies just got a lot bigger. Find out more and visit GigaOm Europe.

Infogr.am, a Latvian company that graduated from Helsinki’s Startup Sauna program, has continued it’s acceleration through HackFwd, and has recently hit 100,000 infographics made on its platform. Co-founder Uldis Leiterts told ArcticStartup that Infogr.am is seeing increasing adoption from large media companies, professional data journalists and bloggers.

Mendeley, the scientific-data aggregation platform (hq, London), already has data on some 65 million unique documents. There are about 3,000 developers who have produced 240 apps that use the platform to help researchers. The UK-based startup just announced that those apps make 100 million requests for information every month. Read more on WSJ.

US-based financial firm JP Morgan is to invest $45 million in Dafiti, built with the backing of Berlin incubator Rocket Internet and now the largest online fashion retailer in Brazil. The investors will take a holding in the e-commerce site, which offers customers a variety of products including clothing, shoes, accessories, cosmetics and home wares. Find out more on VentureVillage.eu.

Playdemic, a UK-based developer of social games, has announced a $4 million round of funding from a group of investors, with $3m of that from the Watson family (grandchildren of IBM founder Thomas Watson). The funding will be used to develop the “second-generation social games”. Read the full article on TechCrunch.